The Three-Pagoda Chinese Bird is the earliest known flying bird in the world.

Early birds were still very poor in number and variety, and the chance of being turned into fossils was very small. For example, only six skeleton fossils and one feather specimen of the late Jurassic Archeopteryx fossils have been discovered in the past 140 years from 1861 to the present.

So, after Archaeopteryx, what is the situation of the bird fossils in the Cretaceous? Ichthyornis and Vesperornis were also discovered as early as the 19th century. They are both birds from the late Cretaceous period. Moreover, since only a handful of birds from the late Cretaceous period have been found around the world so far, most of the fossils are incomplete. , so they are still the best preserved bird fossils in the late Cretaceous strata to this day.

Three Towers Chinese Bird

Before the 1980s, bird fossils from the Early Cretaceous were once one of the most regrettable gaps in biological evolution for paleontologists. Before this, the scientific community knew almost nothing about how birds evolved from the ancestor Archaeopteryx 150 million years ago to the more advanced birds less than 100 million years ago. Even if there are occasional sporadic discoveries, they are just some single feathers or very broken bone fossils. They can only show the existence of some birds and make little contribution to the discussion of the early evolution of birds. This dull situation lasted until the early 1980s. In 1982, a very incomplete bird fossil skeleton was discovered in Mongolia, which caused great surprise among paleontologists. Subsequently, an incomplete fossil of a bird's hind limb skeleton was discovered in Gansu, my country. Professor Hou Lianhai, a paleoornithologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, named it Gansuornis and believed that it was the ancestor of all later waterbirds and coastal birds. Then, scientists discovered some feather fossils and two relatively complete skeletons in different locations in Spain. Unfortunately, there were no head bones in this series of discoveries. However, these successive discoveries continue to stimulate scientists' hopes of solving the problem of bird evolution in the early Cretaceous. And no one could have predicted that all of these discoveries were just precursors of greater discoveries to come. A few years later, a series of complete, exquisite and early Cretaceous bird fossils that occupied an important position in the history of bird evolution were discovered in the western Liaoning region of my country, triggering a revolution in the study of early bird evolution.

The first spring thunder of the great discovery of bird fossils in western Liaoning, China was the discovery of the Three Towers Chinese Bird.

There is a unique farmer in Chaoyang County, Liaoning Province. He has a unique hobby for science and has learned and mastered considerable knowledge of paleontological fossils. During the slack season, he traveled all over the mountains and rivers around his hometown and collected many paleontological fossils. One day in 1987, he accidentally discovered a fairly well-preserved bird fossil. The fossil was found in the early Cretaceous strata. According to the analysis of plant pollen in the output layer, the age is about 130 million years ago. Except for the missing certain bones such as the chest, this specimen has very complete preservation of the bones at the back of the head. This specimen was carefully studied by Rao Chenggang, a young paleontologist at the Beijing Museum of Natural History, and Sereno, another young dinosaur expert at the University of Chicago, and was finally named Three Towers Chinese Bird. The meaning of "Chinese Bird" obviously represents the discovery of China; the "Three Pagodas" are a commemoration of the area where the fossils were discovered, because near the fossil site, three ancient pagodas from the Liao and Jin Dynasties have stood there for more than 1,000 years. for many years. Researchers announced at the time that the Three-Pagoda Chinese Bird was the earliest known flying bird in the world.

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